War & Peace Quote by L. Neil Smith

“Government is waging war against the people” is less a description than a provocation: a sentence engineered to flip the usual moral geometry. Governments claim a monopoly on legitimate violence in order to protect citizens; Smith inverts that bargain and treats the state as an occupying force. The bluntness is the point. No qualifying adjectives, no policy specifics, just a totalizing frame that turns every tax, regulation, surveillance program, and gun law into an act of aggression. It’s an invitation to stop debating “how much government” and start asking whether the institution itself is adversarial by nature.

Smith’s intent, rooted in his libertarian science-fiction worldview, is to collapse the distance between bureaucratic coercion and battlefield violence. “Waging war” smuggles in emergency ethics: if you’re under attack, resistance isn’t merely permissible, it’s virtuous. The subtext is a recruitment pitch for radical skepticism. You’re meant to feel not merely governed, but targeted; not merely frustrated, but betrayed. That emotional turn matters because anger is politically productive. It converts diffuse grievances into a single villain with a single motive.

Context sharpens the edge. Smith wrote in a late-20th-century America where distrust of institutions climbed alongside the growth of federal policing, intelligence capacity, and regulatory statecraft. Post-Vietnam cynicism, the War on Drugs, Ruby Ridge/Waco-era fears, and the steady normalization of surveillance all feed this rhetoric. The line works because it’s elastic: it can attach to any moment when authority overreaches, and it can also justify seeing overreach everywhere. That ambiguity is its power and its danger.